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silverwhittlingknife · 8 months ago

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hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

#dick grayson #anyone with more info feel free to chime in & we can crowdsource <3 #i do think the toy elephant is awfully cute though <3 #total digression but i was thinking about it as i was writing:#i'm fascinated by the ways that the post-crisis batboys & their stories can intersect with 90s masculinity and all its issues with stoicism #and i'm pro-queering and gender-bending - 90s comics were a total boys' club so i think it's neat that transformative fandom isn't #but i do love 90s masculinity and All Its Issues too & one of the things i find compelling about the dick-tim-bruce trio #& especially dick's place in it - is the unspoken hierarchy whereby bruce is manlier than dick & dick is manlier than tim #and so dick's in the middle as this somewhat softer-character who aspires to be a harsher & more stoic & ultimate manly-man character #caught in the middle between robin & batman & what each role represents #and like. batman is both manhood & the only desirable thing to be AND ALSO it represents this immense narrowing of possibility #because so much of stereotypical masculinity is about reducing the range of emotions you're allowed to have or express #and dick is both incredibly conflicted about bruce AND wants to be just like him & by extension is conflicted about masculinity writ large #so a lot of dick's interactions with tim veer between trying on a frat-boy-ish 'I'm The Manly Guy' persona vs. giving up on it #or trying on imitations of Bruce's Batman persona but also trying to backtrack out of it bc he doesn't like how it feels etc etc #ANYWAY i think what i am trying to say is that if tim had a stuffed animal dick would be entertained & poke mild fun at him #and call him 'teddy' for the next hour or something while tim got increasingly defensive about how the teddy bear was steph's #and/or about how the teddy bear was OLD and tim doesn't even care about it and also WHATEVEr i'm above this #and to an uninformed observer this might look like bullying BUT ACTUALLY #this ritual would IN FACT be very reassuring to both of them + tim would feel WAY better afterward than if dick had ignored it #because by poking fun at him dick shows he still respects tim enough to tease him thus subtextually exorcising the threat of wimpiness #plus allowing tim to defend himself & demonstrate that he can take a joke so they've both reaffirmed their masculinity to each other #& they don't have to be scared of the teddy bear and all it represents anymore #however also afterward dick would have a brief nostalgic flashback to when he was a kid & had a teddy bear & feel weird about the memory #because he would be unable to articulate to himself that what he misses is a past when he allowed himself to be vulnerable #anyway this wouldn't actually happen in comics but it's what would happen in my soul. you know.#ask tag #zitka

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mr-aftons-rotting-pussy · 14 days ago

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FIFI I WAS LITERALLY DOING POWER SCALING ALL THE CANON AFTONS YESTERDAY WITH SOME FRIENDS

Let's say canon is: Silver eyes (Dave Miller), Gameverse (OG William Afton) and FNAF Movie (Steve Raglan)

Steve Raglan literally sweeps.

Because rewatching the Springbonnie scene, the suit sound s HEAVY. You can hear it in his fucking thumps of him walking that thing is very Weighted

HE COULD FULL TILT RUN AT A GROWN MAN AND THROW HIM ACROSS THE FUCKING ROOM. And the way he walks around in the suit like it was nothing just meandering around and circling, taunting Mike like okay?

And not to mentioned he KICKED HIM and it KNOCKED MIKE OUT FOR LIKE A GOOD FEW MINUTES. And the fact he could just take off and toss the mask to the ground one handed, that thing sounds like it has a weight too!

And when he got Springlocked in the movie he DIDN'T just die. Like he didn't just keel over and die he was TANKING that shit. Yeah it hurt A LOT getting stabbed I imagine but he was still a little bit alive at the end scene, managing to bounce his leg from the pain.

And we haven't even see how Remnant-Pilled Raglan could look

Dave gets springlocked three times, and his third time he dies. He gets points for that but he's literally skin and bones. I think a vegetable could kill him

Games Afton gets springlocked once and he dies. Though he is definitely more healthier than Dave was and he also pranced around the Springbonnie suit fit a good bit. Enough for him to at least feel powerful in the suit. But he did only got locked once and dies. And then gets revived as Springtrap.

That's the gist of my argument that Steve Raglan is not only the strongest Afton, but he could demolish the other canon Aftons in a fight. The other two could team up against him and they'd still lose.

*coughs** OKAY. i see what you are saying, and i get it a little bit buttttt ☝️ i actually think steve and games!will are probably pretty evenly matched.

ill start w dave tho, dave miller i think is probably the least capable out of all of them. he does get the point for durability like you said, but that was also years before his Dave Era. he does also get a little point because he can still operate spring bonnie, tho all of them can do that so its like bare minimum lol. i do think dave would most likely have his ass handed to him, theres just no way id believe he could beat himself in his 'prime' so to speak,,

that just leaves games!Afton and mr Raglan.......... i think mentioning how heavy the suit seemed in the movie as a plus for steve doesnt really work because theres no real way to tell if the movie suit is actually more physically taxing to perform in than the games suits. but also historically the fnaf endos have always been really bulky and heavy looking for ex. fnaf 2 endo

and even in springtraps model though heavily damaged the endo underneath still has this type of... whatever yknow?? and lastly theres no meaningful difference between movie spring bonnie and games spring bonnie, theyre both made and used the exact same way so i think that its safer to say that theyre extremely similar if not the exact same.

and about the springlock thing ermm..... chgjhfgj i mean theres obv theres going to be a difference between how the springlocking is portrayed in a 8-bit minigame vs a whole ass film. and i just dont believe there is a like........ like its a bit of a stretch to me if im being honest, to say steve is technically stronger because he Technically Survived longer than games will...... i guess?????? i mean......... im just not convinced. like they both went down pretty fast, and id even argue that games Will had it worse because like when we see him being springlocked and how that was shown then we see springtraps model like his entire head and everything was stabbed/crushed so it actually makes MORE sense for games will to MAYBE go down slightly faster. compared to steves slow and steady wins the race version lmao..... but also in general the springlocking in both are literally like 1 for 1 of each other, like even to the posing its like one of The Things from the movie thats actually pretty accurate to how it was shown exactly in the games. like its silly but if anything steve is probably more of a little bitch than games will cause he was knocked down completely before his face n everything even had the chance to be mashed potatoes. soooo...... 🤷‍♂️ lmao

and thats why i think Steve and Og William are pretty even matched. Dave Miller is probably going down first, but games n movie r cutting it pretty close.. 😳 dare i say games William probably has a better chance at beating Steve even considering The Lore.

and that last bit...... fhghfhgh im SORRY but i have to disagree 100% 🙈 games will could hold steve to a line in which Dave would have an opening to shank his ass and hed be done for, and then games Will could dispatch Dave from there. in my humble onion 🧅

#asks #cookie #willie fnafton #steve raglan #dave miller #i dont think i went over the kick thing you mentioned explicitly but i think we can all agree that was 95% the suit doing the work. but also #mike isnt in ANY shape to fight anyone much less in a heavy ass costume lined w metal imo 😭#and alsoooo also..... i think in a battle of the egos Steve and Dave would probably underestimate games Will at least a little bit #Dave and Steve have less in the way of subtlety and games Will is just a little better and playing notmalcy #i think the Ego is more likely to get to our american boys than it is to the OG. this isnt to say games Will doesnt have an ego but he #definitely is a lot more relaxed about it. and has a very calm and even thoughtful demeanor in general. even in his dialouge as scraptrap #this is evident. and i think that makes him just a little more dangerous.... sips juice 🧃🧃🧃#the three of them to me rlly are that one diary of a wimpy kid autism post to a T #Games is the greg. Movie is the rowley. and TSE is the fregley #hsjsbsnnsbsbdhbdh #or smth😁💖 lmk if you think im just talking out of my ass tho lol...

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